Facebook shuts down for 30 minutes due to accidental code leak

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In some ways we take for granted that Facebook is always on, but according to Wired.com the giant social networking site decided to voluntarily shut down its servers yesterday. The decision was prompted by the code for several new products being made public before they were ready for launch. Apparently the downtime only lasted 30 minutes, which does not seem like a long time for mere mortal server admins, but for a site with over 550 million users it must have seemed like an eternity.

The issue was related to the redesigned brand pages and a new photo section called Memories. More specifically, Facebook stated that internal prototypes that they were working on at the time were made public to a number of people externally and as a result the servers were taken down as a precaution.

If you read between the lines it seems a pretty standard explanation, Facebook accidentally made public some of the new additions they were working on before going live, they then had to take the site down and that’s that. But the decision to take down a site with so many users leaves a question mark, and this must have been something pretty important to do so.

Wired.com also thought this and emailed the team at Facebook to see what they could find out, but they were of course tight lipped. Facebook did eventually ring the team and issued this statement:

We are not pleased that we had to shut the website down for 30 minutes on Thursday. But it comes with the territory when you have a culture of iterative innovation. Sometimes code gets pushed out before it’s ready.

Either way it’s all sorted now so we can all go back to posting about random thoughts and uploading massive amounts of photos.